Press Release
- Global Environment
The Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) 11th Inter-Governmental Meeting (IGM) and 11th Science Planning Group (SPG) Meeting, and a Related Workshop Held
The Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) held its 11th Inter-Governmental Meeting (IGM) and 11th Science Planning Group (SPG) Meeting jointly in Bangkok, Thailand between 22 - 24 of March, 2006. Major progress made at the meeting was as follows: [1] the Republic of Korea announced that it is ready to make its financial contribution to the APN for FY 2006. As a result, all OECD countries among APN member countries (Japan, US, Australia, NZ, and Korea) are now donor countries. [2] New projects for the FY2006 were decided: 10 projects for “Annual Regional Call for Proposals" (ARCP) and 13 for “Scientific Capacity Building/Enhancement for Sustainable Development in Developing Countries" (CAPaBLE). [3] Mr. Tsukamoto, Director of the Research and Information Office of the Global Environment Bureau, the Ministry of the Environment of Japan, has been elected as a Steering Committee member, and Prof. Mimura of Ibaraki University, Japan, has been re-elected as a co-chair of SPG.
Prior to IGM/SPG11, the "2nd Scoping Workshop on Global Earth Observations and the Capacity Building Needs of the Region: Focus-Climate" was held between 19 - 21 of March. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss the capacity building necessary for research and monitoring related to climate change and its impact, and the role of the APN in such research and underpinning systematic observations, and to create road maps for designing ideas appropriate for the Asia-Pacific countries and identifying priority capacity building activities in the region. The workshop highlighted the facts that the Asia-Pacific region is particularly vulnerable to Climate Change and that its needs particularly in the networking for enhancing accessibility to existing data and in capacity building for the ability of modeling and simulating are growing. The workshop concluded that the APN is expected to take an active role in networking and capacity building in these areas in keeping with the 10 year implementation plan of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).